For years, Irish Spencer has been well known in the community as an on-air radio personality. This spring, she’s looking for a different kind of platform.
Spencer, a lifelong Guilford County resident, is running for the District 4 seat on the Guilford County Board of Education. As a Democrat, she faces three primary opponents.
Early voting for the primary starts February 12 and runs through February 28. The primary is on March 3 and the general election November 3.
As the “Wild Irish Rose” on 90.1 FM, Spencer is known as an outgoing, direct personality. She hopes to bring some of that to the local school board.
“I think I’m the best candidate to represent students, educators, which include school staff,” she said. “I also believe in transparency and accountability and the community. I think they all need to be folded together, and I’m the best candidate to do that.”
Spencer attended NC A&T State University for her bachelor’s and got her doctorate from Colorado Technical University.
While Spencer has never worked as a full-time educator within Guilford County Schools, she was a ninth-grade substitute teacher at Dudley High School years ago.
“I told them I would do it if I were to have the classes that the system sees as at-risk children,” she said. “Those are the classes that I wanted, and those are the ones they gave me.”
Every student has the opportunity to succeed, she said.
“I’m a huge listener before I decide,” she said. “I’m going to listen to students, staff, and parents to understand their experience. I believe people trust leaders who listen.”
As a communications expert, Spencer said her out-of-the-box thinking has helped her in her career and could bring some fresh ideas to the school board.
In 2015, during the Obama administration, Spencer received a Champion of Change award for her barber shop tour she began in Greensboro. Seeing a need for more volunteers within the Big Brother Big Sisters of the Central Piedmont, Spencer started a campaign in which she put volunteer boxes in Black barber shops across the city. By the time the campaign ended, the program had more Black men who had signed up to volunteer than it had Black boys with whom to pair them.
“It was huge,” Spencer said.
She hopes to bring that kind of innovative thinking to the school district if elected.
With an ongoing school bus driver shortage, she said, the district could launch a media initiative touting how drivers get a free commercial driver’s license if they become a bus driver.
“Our community needs to know that that’s available,” she said.
Spencer is also passionate about school safety — an issue very personal for her family.
In 2016, Spencer’s son William “Tre” Spencer was shot and killed while trying to break up a fight. Since then, Spencer has worked in the community on violence prevention. Her organization, Families Against Senseless Killings or FASK, provides education and support for families in the aftermath of violence.
For her, the work starts outside of school.
“If you can do violence interruption prior to someone going into the school, you can prevent it happening in the school or on the bus,” she said. “You can’t lay it at the feet of one person. You’ve got to lay it at everyone’s feet.”
She supports school resource officers but said that everyone involved, from staff to educators, needs to have de-escalation training. That extends to the community, too.
“I want to work to unite,” she said.
That’s why Spencer, who moderated a Greensboro City Council candidate forum last year, said she doesn’t understand why the school board, like city council, isn’t nonpartisan.
“Our children are not Democrats or Republicans,” she said. “Our children are children. When a person walks into a school to commit violence, they’re not saying, ‘I want to kill all students who are Democrat or Republican or independent.’ So working across the aisle should not even be a question.”
Still, Spencer, who is running as a Democrat, finds herself to the left of certain school-board policies.
She believes in school choice, but believes funding should be for public schools. She also sees the trend in book banning and content moderation as a form of censorship.
“I do not believe you should ban something from a child that gives them the whole story,” Spencer said. “That’s how you make a person whole, and they’re able to communicate with all types of people.”
She pointed to how narratives by the federal government contradict what people are experiencing on the ground in places like Minnesota regarding immigration enforcement.
“It’s the same thing I equate to what’s being seen today,” she said. “We are being told what we see on television, i.e., Minnesota, instead of believing what we see.”
That’s why, as a school board member, transparency will be important, she said.
“We’ve got to have transparency and accountability in what everyone says,” she said. “That’s going to require clear communication. It’s going to require honest conversations about challenges.”